RAS Shanghai Book Launch event – Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City – 12/9/15

Posted: September 10th, 2015 | 1 Comment »

RAS Weekender / Book Launch

Saturday September 12th 2015

4pm for 4.15pm

Tavern at the Radisson Xingguo Hotel

Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City

By Andrew Field & James Farrer

RAS Shanghai has the great pleasure of hosting the launch of this insightful and intriguing book about Shanghai’s nightlife by scholars Andrew David Field and James Farrer.

ABOUT THE BOOKÂ

The pulsing beat of its nightlife has long drawn travelers to the streets of Shanghai, where the night scene is a crucial component of the cityâ€™s image as a global metropolis. In Shanghai Nightscapes, sociologist James Farrer and historian Andrew David Field examine the cosmopolitan nightlife culture that first arose in Shanghai in the 1920s and that has been experiencing a revival since the 1980s. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasuresâ€”the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century.

The book begins by examining the history of the jazz-age dance scenes that arose in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Shanghaiâ€™s foreign settlements. During its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai was known worldwide for its jazz cabarets that fused Chinese and Western cultures. The 1990s have seen the proliferation of a drinking, music, and sexual culture collectively constructed to create new contact zones between the local and tourist populations. Todayâ€™s Shanghai night scenes are simultaneously spaces of inequality and friction, where men and women from many different walks of life compete for status and attention, and spaces of sociability, in which intercultural communities are formed. Shanghai Nightscapes highlights the continuities in the cityâ€™s nightlife across a turbulent century, as well as the importance of the multicultural agents of nightlife in shaping cosmopolitan urban culture in Chinaâ€™s greatest global city.

RSVP: to RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

ENTRANCE: Â Members 70 rmb, Non-members 100 rmb

Includes a glass of wine or soft drink

Refugee Crisis in Shanghai – Terrorized Chinese Rush Frenchtown in 1937

Posted: September 10th, 2015 | No Comments »

This headline accompanied the photograph I posted yesterday of fighting in Chapei (Zhabei) in November 1937 as terrified Chinese outside the international concession flocked into Frenchtown to seek sanctuary from the Japanese bombardment.

For the record the French Concession authorities reported that the number of persons by April 1938 who had arrived and were seeking refuge in the International Settlements was 150,000, including foreigners and displaced Chinese. 80,000 refugees were registered in Settlement camps – mostly comprised of Chinese from the interior of the country displaced by the Japanese invasion.

Refugee Crisis in Shanghai – November 1937 – Chapei Burns as Japanese Attack

Posted: September 10th, 2015 | No Comments »

This picture appeared on the front pages of American newspapers in November 1937 – it was taken by an American cameraman close to the Japanese troops storming Shanghai’s Chapei (Zhabei) district after the August 1937 attack on the city. It shows clearly the level of total destruction wrought in the Chinese portions of Shanghai by the Imperial Japanese Army in the winter of ’37…..as a result 150,000 Chinese refugees crossed into the International Settlements in the ensuing six months….

Japanese Troops Scale the Soochow Creek Wall, January 1938

Posted: September 9th, 2015 | No Comments »

I think this is a rather remarkable picture – Japanese troops, brought to Shanghai as reinforcements after Tokyo’s attack on the city in 1937, arriving by boat and scaling the wall of the Soochow Creek (Suzhou Creek). It’s hard to work out exactly where this is on the Soochow Creek, but it must have been at low tide, and on the largely Japanese-controlled north side of the Creek (Hongkew side), with the Japanese commandeering sampans to take them from their troop ships to the bankside.

North Korea State of Paranoia Gets a New Edition and a Snazzy New Cover

Posted: September 8th, 2015 | No Comments »

Apologies for self promotion but a new edition (with a bit of updating as ever) of my North Korea: State of Paranoia is out in the UK (here) and USA (here). I rather like this cover and it’s slightly cheaper in this B-format…..